Oxygen therapy is the administration of oxygen as a therapeutic modality. It is widely used for a variety of purposes in both chronic and acute patient care as it is essential for cell metabolism, and in turn, tissue oxygenation is essential for all physiological functions. Oxygen therapy should be used to benefit the patient by increasing the supply of oxygen to the lungs and thereby increasing the availability of oxygen to the body tissues, especially when the patient is suffering from hypoxia and/or hypoxemia. Oxygen therapy may be used both in applications in hospital or in home care. The main home care application of oxygen therapy is for patients with severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
Oxygen may be administered in a number of ways. A preferable way of oxygen administration is by using a so called on demand generation of oxygen. Referring to this, commercial solutions, so-called oxygen concentrators or separators, respectively, are widely known. These oxygen concentrators mostly separate oxygen from an oxygen comprising gas, so that the oxygen is provided on demand, i.e. directly before use.
A drawback of the oxygen concentrators, or oxygen separators, respectively, known in the art is the fact that next to desired adsorbed constituents of the oxygen comprising gas, such as nitrogen, for example, undesired contaminants of the oxygen comprising gas, such as water or carbon dioxide, are adsorbed to an oxygen separation device or an oxygen separation material, respectively, thereby contaminating the latter. This contamination of the oxygen separation material often causes the requirement of additional more or less complex measures next to a swing process in order to prevent contamination or to desorb the contaminants again.
Known from U.S. Pat. No. 7,160,367 is a gas separation device being capable of performing a gas separation step using adsorbents sensitive to contaminant deactivation, such as deactivation by atmospheric humidity. Such a gas separation device may comprise a desiccant zone and a water-sensitive adsorber zone between which a respective isolation valve may be provided.
There is, however, still the need for improving the contamination behavior of oxygen separation devices.